“It is pleasant to see great works in their seminal state, pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence; nor could there be any more delightful entertainment than to trace their gradual growth and expansion, and to observe how they are sometimes suddenly advanced by accidental hints, and sometimes slowly improved by steady meditation.”
Samuel Johnson6
Genetic representations apply the material and instrumental delineations used in architectural design to reach an interpretation of the creative, tactical and powerful processes embodied in architectural factures. Genetic architectural representations are traces and expressions of the cognitive structures that are patterns of physical or mental actions that specify acts of intelligence and cor- respond to the stages of an architectural project development. The study of genetic representations attempts to explain architectural knowledge through “drawing knowledge”, on the grounds of its history, and its material genesis by analyzing especially the origins of the drawing and the notions and operations upon which the architectural drawing is based. These notions and operations are extracted in large part from the sensorial blend generated by the sensus communis, so that they can cast light on their significance as knowledge of a somewhat higher level. However, the study of genetic representations also takes into account, wherever possible, formalizations—in particular, logical for- malizations applied to poised thought structures and in certain cases to trans- formations from one level to another in the development of thought. The main focus is the tracing of design development in their analogous and homolo- gous connections with the evolution of operations that takes place on both the drawing board and the construction site.
The examination of beginnings, of alternative and concurrent architec- tural representation, makes it possible to rethink and refine complex theoreti- cal questions on the efficacy of architectural drawings in producing architec- ture. The correspondence between facture and representation is foundational for architectural pedagogy. In the past, many approaches that dealt with the tensions between these two sides of this correspondence highlighted one of them respectively. Interpreted as a duality, the facture and representation bino- mial has fashioned conflicting divergent results. Often, the facture, considered merely as a tectonic fact, was treated as some kind of “truth” that had to be faithfully transposed into mimesis. Recently, especially within the growing trends of digital representations, the event of a tectonic materiality is often considered as something “entirely excluded” from representation, as a retro- spective fiction that results from specific cultural modes to be acknowledged or loathed. Nevertheless, if architectural representations are responsibly and effectively shaped, architects have the amazing possibility to lose themselves within their own images.
There are two factures and two representations for a total of four pro- cedures in any given architectural project: the facture of the drawing and the facture of the building are paired with the representation embodied in
the drawing and the other representation embodied in the building. Conse- quently identifying themselves with the emotions and the materialness of the objects to which they are referring, architects immerse themselves in their drawings materiality; as a kind of inverted transubstantiation the materiality disappears and the architectural meanings learned through these subjective immersions are then projected through two homologous creations of materi- alness: the one of the drawings and the one of the building. This quadripar- tite nature of the architectural project is the delight and the irritation of any sincere architect.
These cognitive configurations map out the expressions and the pat- terns recording the physical or mental actions that correspond to specific acts of intelligence ruling the development of the multiple and working together stages present in any architectural projects. The critical analysis of genetic archi- tectural representations examines the sedimentation of architectural material- ity in the weathered papers and models inscribed with pentimenti, additions, replacements, and erasures. Although it examines tangible documents such as architects’ sketches, notes, drafts, models and blueprint, its real object is some- thing much more indefinable: the motions of drawing that are not optically real, but imaginatively real.
The study of genetic representations remains concrete, for it never posits an ideal architecture beyond those documents but rather strives to reconstruct, from all available evidence, the chain of events present in an architectural pro- cess. A critically constructed genetic analysis is a continuation of the architec- tural imaginative act itself. The study of beginnings, of alternative and concur- rent architectural representation, makes possible to rethink and refine complex theoretical questions of the efficacy of drawings in producing architecture. A critically constructed genetic analysis is the most effective and efficient way to learn architecture.
There are many documents that are part of these sets of transformation and several of them may become lost, but each one has embodied in itself the fundamental nature of the operative factures that architects have used during the processes of mediation for a specific project. These critical mediations are the actions taking place between the construction of the lines and their archi- tectural construing. In non-digital drawings, the paper’s surface is constantly in unrest with each line, erasure, retracing, and reconsideration. If the lines on a computer screen are erased there is no mix of graphite and eraser dirt, there is no risk of loosing the sharpness of your pencil or smudging the ink—smudges can occur only after a rasterizing with a Photoshop smudge tool. Hand draw- ings leave physical residues and pentimenti that carry inspiration and reflec- tions. After a final computer drawing is printed, the only traces of its making are the ink marks set on the paper following a predetermined pattern derived from the algorithmic logic of fast or high definition printing and not from the real sequence of a proper architectural conceiving.